Thursday, November 1, 2012

Obesity in the United States has been increasingly cited as a major health issue in recent decades.
There are several factors that contribute to the rise in obesity. Sedentary
lifestyles coupled with the consumption of pre packaged processed “convenience”
foods seem to be the major contribution factors. If you find that you are obese
or would just lie to get leaner these are the two most important factors to
consider. I started practicing martial arts in my early teenage years; because
of this I have lived an active lifestyle. Yet before I practiced martial arts I
was overweight. When I first became involved in martial arts not only did I
dive headfirst into training I also began to watch what I ate. Within the 1st
3 months of my training I went from 180lbs to 160lbs. Though I have maintained
the same level of activity I did not maintain the same discipline in my diet.
During my 20’s I went from a lean 175lbs to at my heaviest 245lbs. The irony is
that at my heaviest I was the most active I had ever been. Not only did I train
twice a day but I also worked a physical job and taught martial arts at my
school. Most people believe that if you are active you can eat whatever you
want because you will just “burn it off”, nothing could be further from the
truth. Studies have shown that on average with heavy exercise such as jogging,
weight lifting or advanced aerobics you burn on average 10 calories per minute.
That would mean that in a 1 hour session you burn 600 calories. On average 1
muffin can contain 350 to 550 calories. This would mean if you chose to eat a
muffin for breakfast, a food many consider to be healthy, you would need to
perform a minimum of 35 minutes of hard exercise to burn it off. So even though
I was a disciplined trainer, my lack of discipline in the kitchen caused me to
become obese. This is not to argue the lack of importance in exercise, far from
being unimportant, exercise should be part of your overall strategy to get in
shape.

My NFMA instructors photo. My weight at the time this was taken was arounf 230lbs

Finding a meal
plan that works for you

Everyone is
different in regards to what meal plan works for them. During 2007, I was
preparing for a Sanda (full contact fighting) tournament. Part of preparing for
this tournament included attempting to get my weight down so I could enter a
lower weight class. At the time I was working closely with a kung fu brother of
mine who was reducing his weight by eliminating starches from his diet which by
the way was working well for him. When I tried this plan I failed miserably.
For that tournament I failed to make weight and was placed in the unlimited
weight class and had to fight an opponent much larger than I was and who
outweighed me by more than 60lbs. The moral of this tale is that some meal
plans work for some people others do not. From experience I found that if it is
exceptionally hard to stick to a meal plan you most likely will not. The reason
that I failed to succeed using the meal plan that my kung fu brother excelled
at was because I found it extremely difficult to stay with the program. I love
to eat noodles, which are a starchy food and not allowed under the program. The
thought of never being able to eat noodles again and not having a planned cheat
meal caused me to go on noodle binges. These binges were large and frequent
enough that it destroyed any progress I had made in the program. This is a very
common pitfall in fad or extreme diets. The key to successfully finding a meal
program that works for you is finding one you can stick to.

On the left at my heavist(245lbs) performing at the NFMA grand opening

Success

After some time trying to exercise my weight off while
still eating whatever I wanted, I decided to find a meal program that would
help me. It took me years of trying to work off the weight and struggling to
maintain a 5lbs weight loss before I found the motivation to research deeper
into my eating habits and find a program that actually worked for me.
Ironically calorie counting worked for me, most exponents of fad diets will
tell you that it is the most difficult method in an effort to sell you on their
product. In addition to counting calories I also allowed myself a cheat day in
which I could eat whatever I wanted. Allowing myself the cheat day increased my
will throughout the week when cravings arose I was able to curb them by telling
myself “I can’t now but on Friday…”. Another important factor when reducing
calories is the frequency of your meals. Reducing calories can send your body
into starvation mode which will increase the efficiency at which your body
stores fat. To combat this I eat low calorie meals about every 2 hours, this
raises my metabolism and increases my body’s fat burning while consuming few
calories.

photo of me on 9/5/12(on the right) at 190lbs

Something that surprised
me before I began calorie counting was a math equation I found to determine how
many calories I had to consume daily in order to maintain my weight. At the
time I did this equation I was weighing in somewhere between 235lbs to 240lbs.
What I found was I needed to consume somewhere around 5,000 calories a day just
to maintain that weight. The equation is as follows

Step 1

For men 66 + (6.23xweight in pounds) + (12.7xheight
in inches) – (6.8x age in years)

Take the number
from above and multiply it by the level of exercise below

1.2 Sedentary
lifestyle

1.375 Lightly
active

1.55 Moderately
active

1.7 Very active

1.9 Extremely
active

In order to lose
weight you need to take this number which is your base caloric needs per day to
maintain weight and subtract 500 calories from your meal plan.

Personal Meal
Plan

My current plan
is roughly 1500 calories planned in 5 small meals throughout the day. Sometimes
I increase it to 1800 depending on how I feel. Before I began this program in
March of 2012 I weighed in at 235- 240 lbs and I was able to get my weight down
to a strong 190lbs (for a total of 50lbs weight loss) as I am writing this. One
of the most common asked questions about my meal plan is if I have enough
energy. I currently have more energy throughout the day and am able to train
harder and longer, than I was able to when I consumed 5,000 calories per day. Below is what I had to eat yesterday.

Meal 1

Fruit and Yogurt
bowl

1 cup Greek
yogurt

1 cup frozen
blueberries

½ cup bran cereal

Total calories
293

Meal 2

Egg sandwich

2 eggs

1 low calorie bun

2 strips turkey
bacon

Total calories
307

Meal 3

Grilled Chicken
Salad

3oz of grilled
chicken breast

3 cups of mixed greens

1 tomato

1 small pear

2 tablespoons of
fat free dressing

Total calories
283

Meal 4

1 cup low fat Cottage
cheese

1 small apple

Total calories
200

Meal 5

1 power bar

1 apple

Total Calories
350

Health concerns

Weight loss wasn’t
the only motivation for me to start this program. For a few years prior to
starting this program I frequently experience migraine headaches. These
headaches became so severe I often would vomit and become unable to function
for the rest of the day. At first I would get one of these headaches about once
a month or less but soon I was experiencing these headaches on an almost daily
basis. I had thought of a multitude of reasons that this was happening things
like cancer, tumors etc. Some people who knew about these headaches thought I
was on drugs. After doing some of my own research on the subject it turns out I
was on a drug, that drug was caffeine. During the time I was lax in my eating
habits I was consuming large quantities of sweetened and caffeinated beverages.
I would sometimes drink up to six cans of soda per day. The migraine headaches
were caused by caffeine withdrawals. I found a simple method of kicking the caffeine
habit which I had to do before I began my meal plan. The first step was to
eliminate the caffeine from what was my diet then. When I would start to feel a
headache come on I would fix a small cup of tea and drink it. In this way I was
able to slowly reduce the amount of caffeine I was taking in until I no longer
needed any at all. With my current meal plan in place I have not experienced a
single headache. In addition to solving that problem with the reduction in
weight I no longer experience back pain from work and have become more
functional as a martial artist.

When people ask
me what kung fu is for I usually say that kung fu is a skill set designed to incapacitate
an opponent. While it is my unwavering belief that this is true, the motivation
to improve this skill set can have many benefits in the other aspects of life.
If it wasn’t for my desire to “incapacitate and opponent” I would have never
had the motivation to increase my fitness level and by extension my overall
health.

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www.HungSingChoyLayFut.com

Sifu Chris Childs is a 6th generation instructor of Choy Lay Fut Kung Fu under Grand Master Sam Ng. Sifu Childs has practiced the Choy Lay Fut method for over 10 years and in that time has placed 1st in several national and international martial arts tournaments and has participated in hundreds of martial arts demonstrations throughout the world. Sifu Childs was certified as an instructor of the Choy Lay Fut method in 2005 by the Ng Family Chinese Martial Arts Association and received another instructor certification in 2013 by the Chan Heung Choy Lay Fut Founder Association of Hong Kong. Sifu Childs has dedicated himself to the promotion and dissemination of the Choy Lay Fut method. With that goal in mind he has authored several articles for Kung Fu Taichi magazine, taught seminars throughout the united states, published numerous videos displaying and teaching Choy Lay Fut and also continues to teach students though his own martial arts school, the Hung Sing Martial Arts Association.